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UK smartphone users in the majority

Mobile technology has reached a new milestone in the UK, with 50.3 per cent of the population now owning a smartphone.

For the 12 weeks ending 22nd January 2012, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech's figures show that smartphones dominated the mobile market, accounting for over 70 per cent of UK mobile phone sales.

The most popular operating system is still Android, but Apple has increased its share with the iPhone now holding onto 29.1 per cent of the market, up from 21.7 per cent a year ago.

Windows Phone 7 is also making inroads, surpassing 2 per cent for the first time and Dominic Sunnebo, Kantar's global consumer insight director, says that Windows users are more "engaged" with this type of phone.

"Eighty one per cent of [Windows] handset owners have used social networking on their device in the past month, higher than both iOS and Android," he said.

Cisco recently predicted that the number of mobile internet-connected devices will exceed the number of people on earth in 2016.

By this time, worldwide mobile data traffic will have reached 130 exabytes per annum, which is equivalent to 4.3 quadrillion MP3 files.